Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (540780)	1/4/2010 8:00:54 PM
From: TimF	2 Recommendations Respond to of 1574098

"Wrenching, yet Cleansing" Saying goodbye to $75 billion is always tough. Discovering that your government used it to do harm, hurts even more. In February, President Obama announced the "Making Homes Affordable" program, a plan to lower mortgage payments for deadbeats, er, homeowners who couldn't keep the payments current. The plan took $75 billion in tax dollars from those of you who pay your bills and transferred it to those who don't. Spreading the wealth. As usual, It didn’t work. "It's a failure," said Henry Sommer, director at the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys in Philadelphia. "We’re looking at millions of foreclosures on the horizon and only a tiny amount of these mortgages have received permanent modifications." The Atlantic is more blunt. Some government programs turn out to be moderately successful. Others turn out to be a disappointment. A few turn out to be disastrous failures. Then there's the Obama administration's mortgage modification program, which hasn't done well enough to qualify for even the worst of those categories. Data released yesterday shows that it's had an incredibly pathetic 1% success rate thus far... Government made things worse. In this case, government made things so much worse that even the New York Times acknowledges it. “(D)esperate homeowners have sent payments to banks in often-futile efforts to keep their homes, which some see as wasting dollars they could have saved in preparation for moving to cheaper rental residences... (T)he program has impeded economic recovery by delaying a wrenching yet cleansing process through which borrowers give up unaffordable homes and banks fully reckon with their disastrous bets on real estate, enabling money to flow more freely through the financial system.” That wrenching process is the creative destruction that lets capitalism work. The cleansing lets prices find a real floor, so economies can grow again. That is, unless politicians pretend they can prevent all pain. Then they take your money, waste it, and create much more pain. stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com